Laval’s new body of work continues her ongoing exploration of our relationship to nature and of space as both physical or geographical and imaginary. Her pigment prints are composite landscapes of natural shapes and radical manipulation of light. The artist focuses on abstracting the experiences of memory, narrative and everyday life. The resulting imagery becomes a bridge between the world we live in and a more surreal, dreamlike dimension, which depicts a disorienting representation of nature. Her approach is rooted in experimentations harking back to 20th century avant-garde and surrealism that explore the limits of the medium and engage a dialog with other mediums such as painting, moving images and performance. The distortions, superimpositions and otherworldly colors are created in camera as single frames using reflective surfaces, natural and artificial light, skewed perspectives and at times extreme crops. Each layer of her photographs transposes the position of her lens, leaving the viewer blissfully unaware of which way is up or down.
In Trembling Giant, Laval captures Pando, a unique ecosystem located in Fishlake National Forest in Utah, which was featured in the Voyages Issue of The New York Times Magazine in 2018. The ancient forest, connected by one intertwined root system, is believed to be the largest and most dense organism ever found and is estimated to have started at the end of the last ice age. The Pando clone, Latin for “I spread”, spreads over 106 acres with over 40,000 individual trees. As the wind moves through their leaves, the trees tremble and produce a unique and ethereal sound, collectively becoming the Trembling Giant.
Laval’s imagery is a visual representation of the wind rustling the leaves in this ancient forest. The sense of movement, with a mixture of stills and video, collapses time and place for the viewer – dreamlike dimensions result where nature becomes another reality. Cool blues and purples and unearthly tones mark this transcendence, and a new world is created where nature is omnipresent and all encompassing. Living beings appear here and there, a deer, a face, but they are frozen in time, spellbound by the motion of the trees and the sound of the leaves.
Solo exhibition by artist Karine Laval at SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC (USA), April 27 - June 8, 2022.
In Trembling Giant, Laval invites us to dive into a magical forest through an immersive installation of wall coverings, stills and moving images with a soundscape by sound artist Jeff Rice.